Reporting: The Catalyst for Performance Management

By Tracy Harris, Campaign Manager, Product Marketing, Cognos

Reporting has historically been one of the most common starting points where Cognos customers have begun their Performance Management initiatives. As part of a four-part series, the business intelligence roadmap that many Cognos customers have taken will be outlined as a practical way for organizations to achieve performance management. This month we will focus on the initial step that is the most common: solving immediate reporting needs. Later parts of the series will take you further through the journey – extending insights through business intelligence, driving it enterprise-wide and introducing the full breadth of the Performance Management system as a way to achieve business transformation.

Why is Reporting the Catalyst?

As one of the core components of Business Intelligence and Performance Management, reporting delivers the ability to answer fundamental questions about the business by providing deep insight into critical data. Given that it is such a crucial pillar of organizational success, it is evident why reporting needs are often the first to be addressed. However, by focusing on solving immediate needs without a vision for the future, organizations often realize too late that the rapid evolution of technology and growth of their enterprise IT structure has created a less than optimum approach to solving overall business performance issues. They then begin to look for a better way to leverage data assets enterprise-wide.

Beginning the Journey: Solve Immediate Reporting Pains

A reporting journey will often begin with a need for a particular type of reporting, often driven by a specific business need:

• Managed Reporting: The classic one-to-many reporting approach. For instance, a standard monthly report generated from a data warehouse that is pushed out to various users.
• Business or Ad-Hoc Reporting: Providing end users with additional dynamic report creation. For instance, allowing them self-service access to the system to look for an answer to a pointed question. For instance, how many units have I sold in a particular region?
• Production Reporting: High-volume reporting, generated from transactional sources, typically with high-fidelity formatting designed by developers to be consumed by customers and suppliers. For instance, invoicing for purchases.
• Operational or Transactional Reporting: Real-time or up-to-the-minute reporting from transactional systems or financial systems that provides immediate and continuous visibility into data. For instance, product sales in a supply-chain environment.
• Analytical Reporting: For users who need to see trends at the macro-level and be able to slice and dice and drill into information from various sources. For example, a sales manager who needs to view revenue by geography, date and sales person and drill into that data to determine why the particular results were achieved.

As each type of reporting manifests itself with particular technology requirements, there is often a discussion between the business and IT in defining and evaluating which technology will satisfy the business need. As IT balances the requirements of the business with adding yet another technology solution to the already fragile IT infrastructure, a thorough product evaluation is critical to ensure both the immediate and future needs are addressed with the solution. A few key questions our customers ask when evaluating a reporting solution:

• Can this solution be extended to solve several types of reporting pains? (Managed, Ad-Hoc, Production, Operational and Analytical Reporting?)
• Can it address the diverse needs of my users and expand information use more broadly – while minimizing the impact on IT?
• Will it allow all my users to access and trust the same view of  data across the organization – even though I have diverse and complex data sources?
• Can I leverage my existing investments with flexibility to respond to new demands?

Cognos customers have been able to address their full breadth of reporting needs with Cognos 8 BI, which provides a complete range of reports from one authoring environment: including managed reports, operational reports, analytical reporting, ad-hoc reporting and production reporting. The self-service capabilities help alleviate reporting backlogs and provides a broad range of user access modes whether it be through a Web Browser, Search, Mobile Device or “Office” Software. The common business model provides a consistent view of all data to business users in terms they understand. Cognos 8 BI’s single platform built upon a web-based service-oriented architecture, leverages an existing IT infrastructure and allows access to all heterogeneous data sources today - and it can evolve to meet tomorrow’s needs.  

Cognos customers who have successfully built a performance management solution often began by addressing immediate reporting needs, but made sure to lay the foundation for Performance Management. In next month’s issue we will further explore how Cognos customers venture to extend their insight into the business through additional Business Intelligence capabilities.